Count Us In: Launching Attendance Awareness Month
School attendance is essential to academic success, but too often students, parents and schools don’t realize how quickly absences, excused or unexcused, can add up to academic trouble. Chronic absence— missing just 18 days per school year— can leave third graders unable to master reading, sixth graders failing courses and ninth graders dropping out of high school. The impact is the greatest on low-income students who lack the resources to make up for the lost... ... More »

The Campaign for Grade Level Reading in Palm Beach County
The Campaign for Grade Level Reading is alive and flourishing in Palm Beach County, Florida.  Home to a Campaign Pacesetter, Children’s Services Council, and a 2012 All-America City Award Finalist, Delray Beach, the county is abuzz with reading activities and initiatives.  Children’s Services Council has teamed up with the Literacy Coalition of Palm Beach County to form a steering committee to guide a county-wide public education campaign that supports the Campaign’s three primary initiatives:  school... ... More »

Providence Wins $5 Million Prize for Vocabulary Initiative
Providence won the grand prize in the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayor Challenge this week, garnering $5 million for an innovative early learning initiative that will build young vocabularies and complement the local grade-level reading effort. Beating out 300 proposals from across the country, the Providence Talks initiative includes outfitting children under age 4 with small electronic devices that will record how many words and conversations these children hear each day.  The words will then be counted and... ... More »

Guest Post: Making Early Math Skills Count
Charissa Fernandez, Chief Operating Officer of TASC, shared this blog post, which originally ran on the ExpandedEdSchools blog. If you'd like to share a post on the Grade-Level Reading blog, please send a copy to pjordan@gradelevelreading.net We hear a lot about the importance of giving our earliest learners a strong foundation in literacy, but what about math? Do kids also need to enter school knowing basic mathematical concepts? According to a new study published in the journal PLOS... ... More »

Celebrating Dr. Seuss’s Birthday: What are you doing March 1?
The National Education Association is again sponsoring its “Read Across America” day, celebrating Dr. Seuss’s birthday. The events are set for March 1, since his birthday (March 2) falls on a Saturday. Policymakers and educators across the country will be donning Cat-in-the-Hat hats and reading to young children. This represents an opportunity for the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, its partners and its Communities Network to promote early literacy and share the news about the good work... ... More »